A Woman Out Shopping with Her Pet Rabbit, Santa Monica, California, from the series "Stranger Passing"

Starting in 1985 and continuing sporadically over the next 15 years, Joel Sternfeld photographed people he encountered while traveling across the United States, culminating in the portrait series Stranger Passing. With this project, he sought to capture the changing American landscape at the end of the 20th century by presenting a sampling of what the country’s residents looked like at that moment. These seemingly casual, chance encounters were in fact photographed with a camera that uses 8 x 10–inch film, a so-called large-format apparatus that requires considerable time to set up for an exposure. Throughout this coast-to-coast survey, Sternfeld concentrated on the dress, pose, and material possessions of his unnamed subjects—details that invite various assumptions yet, separated from the broader world, resist a definitive typecasting.